Giorgia Garilli

Profile

Biography

Giorgia Garilli joined the department in 2026 as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on 100 Years of The Well of Loneliness (AHRC). Giorgia completed a PhD in English Literature at York in 2024, where she also completed her BA and MA. She has since taught at both the University of York (in English and in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies) and York St John University. She holds a 2026–27 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, supported by the Frederic D. Weinstein Memorial Fellowship in Twentieth-Century American Literature.

Giorgia’s research interests include twentieth and twenty-first century fiction, the intersections between literature and politics, care studies, and digital culture. Her current research focuses on narratives of coercive care in lesbian fiction. 

Research

Overview

Giorgia’s doctoral research focused on the contentious cultures of self-care that flourished in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. Her first monograph project makes a case for contemporary online wellness culture as a generatively messy mainstay of contemporary popular culture, and an unlikely site of literary possibility. This work argues that by laughing at and with self-care in ways that are conspicuously complicated—and often contrived—contemporary fiction re-enlivens tired clichés about the dubious politics of wellness in a state of liberal and literary crisis. Some of this work, on Patricia Lockwood and Trump-era internet humour, has appeared in Textual Practice. 

Giorgia’s current research project focuses on lesbian narratives of coercive care in Radclyffe Hall and beyond. Her work explores how Hall’s writing intervenes in a cultural fascination with depicting relationships between women as abuses of power. It will trace the afterlives of this trope through to the present day to situate Hall as a vital catalyst in lesbian fiction’s

complicated and under-explored relationship with care and abuse. Giorgia’s work on the 100 Years project will also explore The Well’s Italian publication and translation histories. Her chapter on gaslighting in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is forthcoming in Literary Narratives of Coercive Control (ed. Katherine Mullin and Hannah Roche, Edinburgh University Press).